“Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.”[167] The following paragraph appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in the year 1839 (5: 218): “Forty years ago, the practice of wreaking private vengeance, or of inflicting summary and illegal punishment for crimes, actual or pretended, which has been glossed over by the name of _Lynch’s Law_, was hardly known except in sparse, frontier settlements, beyond the reach of courts and legal proceedings.” The above quotations set forth clearly the condition of affairs in the United States at this time. It was the spirit of the times, rather than any particular cause, which brought about recourse to lynch-law practices. Lynch-law was invoked for no particular offense to the exclusion of all other offenses; neither was it peculiar to any one section of the country. From having been practised only in the border settlements as a temporary means of suppressing lawlessness until the civil regulations could be established, lynch-law methods had come to prevail even in well settled communities. Those writers who expressed the opinion about 1830 that lynch-law was dying out did not foresee the great popular excitement which existed during Jackson’s administration. The anti-slavery agitation acted as a spark in a tinder-box and seemed to beget a spirit of lawlessness in every part of the country. To the inflamed imagination of the popular mind the slightest provocation seemed a serious offense. The law did not reach such offenses, or they were deemed to be inadequately punished by the law, and this seemed to the people a justification for summary punishment. In the slave States such punishment was generally a whipping or flogging, often followed by tarring and feathering, inflicted upon abolitionists or any persons suspected of “tampering with the slaves,” or distributing “incendiary tracts.” In cases of a suspected conspiracy for an insurrection among the slaves the supposed leaders were often summarily punished, sometimes by the infliction of the death penalty. Along the Mississippi River, the gamblers had aroused the resentment of the peace-loving portion of the community by their vices and excesses of various kinds. In many places they were able to bid defiance to the civil authorities and laugh at threats of enforcing the law against them. Here again the exigencies of the situation seemed to the people to justify the adoption of lynch-law. This case of the summary treatment of the gamblers may be regarded as a transition from the frontier type of lynch-law to the sporadic and epidemical type which later prevailed in the well settled States.